Small Changes (49 page)

Her relationships with men consisted mostly of pickups and brief adventures in which she was determined to remain
unexploited emotionally. She said that without the house she would go crazy. Her bisexuality seemed to Beth more a thing she would argue to other women as necessary to their dignity than something she pursued. However, Dorine told her Laura had fallen in love with a woman at the paper and that they had lived together for two months. While Laura was covering a demonstration in Washington, the ex-boy friend had got the woman back. Laura had been badly hurt, and she was still protecting that large sore. She was convinced she had been sent out of town intentionally.

Of the children Fern was the more physical, walking already and yanking at anything she could reach, tugging and tasting. Into whatever was left open, unlocked, ajar. David was the more verbal and moodier. Connie was always worrying aloud because he was the only male in the house. “Don’t fret, I’m gonna fill up the house with babies,” Sally said calmly. “I figure to have another little baby. Soon as I work through in my mind how I want to do it this time.”

Because Beth was happy in the house and because the need for money forced her into a job as a typist downtown, and finally because the thought of Miriam married made her shy, it was awhile before she called. Miriam Stone, Mrs. Neil Stone, was her name. She had to find out that strange name before she could find her. Miriam Berg was no more. Women must often lose a friend that way, and never be able to find each other again.

Saturdays, Laura was teaching her to drive. She barked, she teased, she tried to make Beth grasp too many things at once, but she was overall patient and Beth was learning. Amazingly the car obeyed her. When she was married, she had got a learner’s permit and Jim had begun to give her lessons. But the lessons happened less and less often after the first few. Since Jim kept the car with him anyhow, she did not push. Now it would be a piece her car too, once she had her license.

The next Saturday Laura had a conference to cover. Connie gave Beth a quick parking lesson in the morning before she took the car to run errands and drop David by his father’s for the day. So Beth called Miriam and asked if she could come over. Miriam sounded surprised and pleased, but the conversation kept being interrupted by someone asking questions behind her. Beth felt shy on the phone anyhow. After lunch she took a house bike. It was a long bike ride but the
day was cool and buoyant and sunny, to be enjoyed.

The house was on a corner lot, the lawn neglected and puddled. Freshly painted a dark gray with dark green trim, it was a big turn-of-the-century structure with a tower jutting out at the corner. In front the big maple was not yet in leaf and dense bushes made a bare and twiggy thicket on the side facing the cross street. It looked formidable because of the dark color or perhaps because, unlike their house, it did not seem to be standing ramshackle and wide open. She had a brief memory of childhood, of going to call on girl friends. In her neighborhood children did not ring the bell or knock. She used to stand outside and yell, “
DO-LORE-ES! DO-LORE-ES!
Come on out and play!”

Slowly she climbed the steps. At least they were as sagging as her own. A ladder and cans of paint with colors dripped down their sides stood on the porch.

“Beth! It is you!” Miriam hugged her, bulky coat and all. They made glad noises at each other as Miriam took her coat and they stood somewhat uncertainly in the huge high-ceilinged entrance hall. “Oh, the house. You don’t really want a damn tour, do you? It’s mostly a mess. Look, the beautiful woodwork, etc. Isn’t it somebody’s Moorish dream?”

All around the entrances to the living room, dining room and den off the hall and on the stairway were carved wooden arabesques. High on the stairway was a stained-glass window. The living room had a marble fireplace. The few pieces of furniture huddled together around the hearth as if for warmth, a couple of Danish chairs and a couch consisting of cot and bolster.

The dining room, in more usable shape, was furnished with big oak pieces, a round table on claw legs, a high glass-fronted cabinet. They drifted through to the kitchen. The front hall had been too imposing, the living room too empty, but the kitchen gave her a thread of connection. The stove was new and big with two ovens and the refrigerator too was new, but mostly the kitchen was old-fashioned with a pantry off it and a sagging floor covered with shabby linoleum showing older linoleum through holes. Miriam put on a kettle for tea and brought out some tins for Beth to choose. She picked Earl Grey for the lavender scent.

Miriam’s lustrous black hair was loose on the shoulders of a dull golden Indian shift, embroidered down the front and at the hem with green and orange. That remembered warmth
and kindness wove almost compulsively around Beth as she sat chewing whole wheat bread with grape preserves.

“Yes, I learned to bake bread. Bethie, you can’t guess how sensual it is! It competes with fucking. The dough feels alive in your hands. Isn’t it delicious? I’m serious. Don’t I bake great bread?”

Different, yes, but how? The year and a half had calmed and burnished Miriam. Beth watched her cross to the cupboard. Her gracefulness had taken a stately turn. Beth thought she could guess. Miriam had lost self-consciousness, she had settled more into her full body. No longer feeling so observed from many sides, she did not watch herself with that same nervously sexual wariness. She was not hunter or hunted. She was actually at home. Was that the result of her marriage? Beth began to wonder if she generalized about marriage from too small a base. Could marriage be good for Miriam?

The bread was delicious. She stared at a pegboard studded with instruments whose uses were strange to her, choppers and grinders and whirls of wire and odd-shaped spoons. “Do you like to cook now?” Beth winced at the flatness of her question. It was a poor question for all that she wanted to pack into it. It stood for what she would have liked to ask outright. When she had last seen Miriam, Miriam had like her been fighting for her scrap of social dignity, survival as a person. Was it true then that a kitchen, a marriage bed made Miriam happy, this big dark gray house of Mr. and Mrs. Stone?

As if Miriam read something of her intent, she gave Beth a slow sweet smile. “Stay to supper and find out.”

“But you never did like to cook. The whole issue of food was a war between Jim and me—when I was married.”

“You were married. Sometimes I forget.” Miriam dripped honey on a slice of dark bread. “I guess I was afraid if I gave any signs of liking the things women are supposed to I’d get stuck somehow. I wouldn’t be taken seriously in my profession. I’d get even worse treatment from the men I was involved with.”

“I don’t enjoy ‘life support’ work. I don’t mind if everybody shares it, but nothing will ever make me like it.”

“But I feel good as a woman now—Neil’s done that for me. I don’t feel like I’m battling all the time in every area of my life. For the first time in my whole life, somebody really
loves me. I don’t have to fight him, I don’t have to be struggling on that front. I can enjoy being a woman. So I can do all kinds of things I never did, like cooking, like baking. And they give real pleasure to people, and to me.”

“Why did you get married? Did you really want to?”

“Yes!” Miriam clasped her hands on the table, leaning toward her. “Oh yes, Beth, I did! I wanted so badly for some man finally to gamble on me as a woman. Oh, you know he hurt me so bad.”

“Jackson?” Beth said softly.

Miriam nodded, “I was sick of being treated as a thing that couldn’t be trusted. Sick of being punished. Of being pulled and hauled and held off. Yes, deep inside I wanted somebody to say he really wanted me, really wanted to commit himself to me and mean it. Not to hold back the words, not to hold back the love, not to hold back his head or his hand or his trust. It felt so good! It still feels beautiful. I kept thinking at first, Neil doesn’t really see me, he’ll get disillusioned, he’ll withdraw. But he didn’t. Sometimes I dance around here by myself with joy. Thinking that I’m loved, finally I can love somebody without being charged my soul, without paying in blood.” Miriam rose and came around the table to put her hands on Beth’s shoulders. “I don’t mean to sound egotistical, wrapped up and wallowing in comforts. It’s just that it feels so nice to be happy for a change.”

“You moved out of Pearl Street that winter?”

“Apparently the night you left town. I had a fight with them. I felt fed up in a final, bitter, ugly way and I couldn’t take any more.” Miriam shuddered and sat down.

“I was angry with you for not helping me. I know it’s irrational. I couldn’t get hold of you. But I was mad at you because you weren’t there to help me.”

“I was angry at myself.”

“I felt you let me down. But I don’t now. If I hadn’t let them scare me, everything would have been all right.”

“Why did you stay away so long? Did you go back to him? Everybody thought you had.”

“How could people think that! No. I was scared that he’d trace me. I made up my mind not to come back until I was free and clear.”

“So you got a divorce?”

“It’s a matter of time now. Everything’s worked out and I feel pretty secure. Part of me will always be a little scared
until I’m free. Miriam, even if I loved somebody, I’d never get married again. It’s too scary.”

“But that depends on the person. If you trust a man, it’s not scary. If you really communicate, if you love and trust each other—I know Neil wouldn’t want to hurt me. I
know
him.”

“I guess I’d like to feel that way about somebody,” Beth said doubtfully. “I guess I would. But I don’t see what that has to do with asking the state to register you as a legal bind. If I trusted somebody and loved them, I’d figure they wouldn’t need to be tied up with a contract.”

“But sometimes you want to make a public statement, a public commitment about the way you feel. You want to be a family. I want to have kids with Neil, and sure you can do it the way Sally does, but not if you work at a job, not if you want your kids to get a good education. Sometimes you just want to stand up and say, ‘We are a family. We are together.’ ”

“I could see some ceremony where you get married by saying so and divorced by saying so. But this is the patriarchal way, where you lose your name and become property. I’ve gone through it once, to be owned by somebody no matter what I want.”

“If you loved a man a whole lot and trusted him, Bethie, it wouldn’t feel like ownership. It would feel like loving.”

“You forget, I had the same training in falling in love as you did,” Beth said somberly, sitting up straight. “I did think I was in love with Jim.”

Miriam gave her that sweet slow smile again and took her hand. “Thinking you’re in love in high school, full of true romances, is not quite the same as growing slowly to love somebody when you’ve been through a few men and you have some idea who you are. You won’t make the same mistakes.” Miriam stood up. “Now, you must agree to stay to supper, because then we can run down to the fish market and get a nice piece fish to feed you. But if you don’t and you won’t, I have to put the roast in. Come, will you eat my married food?”

Beth stayed. “Sally said you married your boss. Doesn’t it feel funny at work? You are still working, aren’t you?”

“Beth, you’re the limit!” Miriam put on her coat. “Marriage hasn’t changed my personality! I’m more of a person now, not less, because I’m not wasting all that energy fighting those
I should be getting love and support from. Neil was head of the project I was working on. Naturally, I was put on a different project, and now I’m under Dick Babcock, not Neil. Worse luck.”

“Do you still like working there?”

“It’s a good place—lots of topnotch people, interesting vibes.” But Miriam’s voice lacked conviction.

Neil had been off playing his first game of tennis of the season with Dick, who was treasurer and office manager of Logical. He was taller and bulkier than Neil and broken out now in a heavy sweat, even his mustache wet and drooping and his face a dark red. “Ha, I’ll get you next time,” he was shouting as they came in. “Just out of practice. Too much booze.”

“You should exercise in the winter. We lead sedentary lives,” Neil was saying, kissing Miriam in the kitchen, rumpling her hair, cruising the top of the stove without interrupting his remarks. “Then suddenly one spring day you think you’ll be an athlete. That’s abuse of the body.”

“Don’t think you haven’t put on a few pounds with home cooking.”

“Too true,” Neil said amiably. “Still, you know, a good regimen of exercise on a daily basis …” He went upstairs to shower and change. Dick ended up getting invited to supper too.

Coming into the dining room while Beth and Miriam were setting the table, Dick looked Beth over without subtlety and obviously decided he was not interested. At the table he talked company gossip. Beth, relieved not to be stared at any more, did not mind what they talked about, although Miriam kept making strenuous efforts to get the conversation onto more general subjects.

Neil was close to Miriam’s height and built on a lean wiry mold. His eyes were greenish brown over a carefully kept dark curly beard, much curlier than the hair on his head. His face was young and mobile. He admired the meal out loud and urged Dick to express his appreciation, eating a little stooped with precise neat motions. “Bread, Dick, you must try some. This is none of your sawdust chemical-laden bread, full of alum and plaster of paris and formaldehyde. This is real bread that Miriam bakes herself.” Everyone ate heartily and a great deal. Beth felt Neil accepted her presence, but without
curiosity. “Oh, Miriam doesn’t mind if you stay to supper,” he had said to Dick in her presence. “She’s always bringing people home. We feed half of greater Boston. Our favorite charity is our dinner table.”

“It’s her Jewish-mother syndrome,” Dick said. “Eat, eat.”

At the table they talked of a “jaunt to Washington” Dick had just made with Ted somebody, “to try to pry loose some funds for heuristic programing fun and games.” They exchanged stories about a contract monitor who liked Logical and thought they were groovy and creative. She would do what she could to get them the contract, but they had an enemy there too. It seemed that Abe, Logical’s president, had once crossed swords with that enemy’s protégée at a Spring Joint Computer Conference seminar. Dick wanted to include Neil’s name on the proposal they were trying to get funded, that would support Frank and Ted full time, but Neil said that his time was all used up on other contracts. “Unless you can slap me on as a consultant, it won’t work. After all, you can’t charge my evening hours, the government will never believe it.”